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Tier I supplier Continental recently hosted a show-and-tell of near- and midterm future technologies at its wintry 540-acre Brimley test facility in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The names of many of the concepts might sound familiar, but Conti’s engineers have brought an interesting twist to each. We’ll start with the one that’s closest to being ready for prime time and work our way into the future.

Trailer Merge Assist

I only tow a trailer a few times a year, and each time I find it as difficult to judge where the back of that thing is as I do judging the left front corner of any right-hand-drive car I pilot in England or Japan. This idea takes all the guesswork out of it simply by reprogramming the car’s blind-spot assist system. Turns out those 24 GHz short-range radar units located behind the rear bumper fascias in most such systems employ can be programmed not only to sense that a trailer is there, but sense how long the trailer is by bouncing beams under the trailer and detecting how far back the signals stop reflecting off the trailer’s undercarriage. We saddled up in an F-150 pulling a typical enclosed car trailer, and by viewing a system monitor (which wouldn’t be in a customer product), we saw that the system immediately identified the presence of a trailer, initially assuming a 50-foot length. About a minute later the system had determined the actual length to be 25 feet. Pass a slower-moving vehicle and the blind-spot monitor lamp remains illuminated for an additional 10 feet after the trailer has cleared the obstacle. It’s a simple software upgrade and vehicle integration exercise, so we can’t imagine the Detroit Three truck manufacturers aren’t arm-wrestling to get it into their trucks. We’d wager Ford will get it first, as the F-150 uses Continental radar units today.

Auto Assisted Safe Backing

Take your backup camera (preferably a megapixel 185-degree fish-eye type), add some software that can identify the objects in the image, tie the whole thing in with your collision-mitigation braking hardware, and voila! Your car stops before you hit your kid or the expensive toy he/she left in the driveway just out of your line of vision. The software employs some savvy “probabilistic modeling” to predict the likely path of moving objects detected, and also predicts the driver’s likely and possible path of travel. These are used to determine how critical any particular bogey showing up in the camera image is. Humans and bicyclists are more likely to move than other objects, and the system knows which way the car can move depending on the steering angle. Depending on the imminence of a predicted impact, the system can jam on the brakes or apply them softly. The system will also brush the brakes when an object is detected near but not in the line of travel to draw the driver’s attention and prepare to stop if it moves into the vehicle’s path. The scenarios demonstrated for us seemed quite natural, and unlikely to provoke system deactivation, but the experts warn that they are still studying ways to prevent system misuse—such as if drivers stopped bothering to look behind them or at the screen, relying solely on technology to keep everything safe. Continental hopes its system could make a dent in the 18,000 annual injuries and 300 deaths attributed to reversing collisions.

Cross-Traffic Braking

As with the above, this concept leverages the system that has hitherto only warned drivers of vehicular, pedestrian, or bicycle traffic that may be crossing the path of a car reversing out of a perpendicular or 45-degree-angle parking spot, and then utilizes the collision mitigation braking system to stop the car if necessary. In reverse, it still sounds a warning and flashes the forward collision alert LEDs in the windshield when something is coming, and while that warning is sounding, if you release the brake it will hold the car still until the obstacle passes, then release the brakes and allow the car to start idling backward without driver intervention. If you’re in motion, it will stop the car with a louder, more insistent tone and keep it stopped until the driver presses the gas pedal. The system can also be added to the front of the car, but when the car is in Drive and the forward cross-traffic detection is active, there’s no warning tone for passing traffic, only intervention if the driver tries to maneuver into harm’s way. This system is mostly fully developed and just awaiting implementation with a manufacturer.

Autonomous Emergency Braking

Various cars currently offer collision-mitigation braking, but full-size trucks typically don’t, because of the large amount of brake fluid that must be moved to halt a lumbering (perhaps loaded to GVW) truck. So the big innovation here — in addition to the combination camera/LIDAR sensor in the windshield — is Continental’s brake-by-wire MKC1 vacuumless power brake unit. Fear not, there is a fail-safe passage to allow the pedal to actuate the hydraulic brakes directly in case of a system failure. The brake pedal moves a small amount of hydraulic fluid against a rubber disc that provides the pedal feel. From this the computer infers braking intent and generates the appropriate force by turning a high-precision brushless direct-current electric motor that moves a screw jack to compress a typical twin-circuit hydraulic master cylinder. This system has the capacity to move five times more fluid that a vacuum booster can, and way more than the typical 14cc/second required to arrest a loaded truck. The system can provide a 40 percent mass reduction because of the elimination of the vacuum booster and the electric vacuum pump that modern EVs, hybrids, diesels, and even some modern high-efficiency gas engines require when the engine provides insufficient engine vacuum. Other benefits include silent operation (no vacuum booster hiss), reduced complexity (luxury and sport variants of a car line could share the hardware, with tuning to suit vehicle character), and the ability to employ low-drag calipers that pull the pads away from the rotors without the spongy brake feel this often incurs, and tunable brake pedal feel. We sampled Comfort, Normal, and Sport on a Ram test vehicle and the middle one felt about right. The automatic braking was also impressive, waiting until the very last possible second and then providing a level of stopping power that almost felt like a frontal collision, stopping just short of the detected obstacle. This one is a bit farther out, and pricing will likely be higher initially, until this booster gains widespread use.

Electronic Air Suspension with Switchable Volume and Load Recognition

Roll mitigation is a big issue with large SUVs that sometimes are asked to carry a lot of mass on the roof. (‘Fess up, most of us have probably carried more weight on a luggage rack than the owners’ manual recommends.) No problem. Continental has taught its air spring suspension computers to pay attention to how the forces in each air suspension bag vary as the car accelerates, brakes, and turns. Using this information, the computers can calculate the position of the center of gravity and re-tune the stability control roll-mitigation algorithms to suit. The system recalculates each time a door is opened for 2 seconds or longer, and the recalibration is supposed to happen during the typical drive out of a subdivision. The Continental air suspension in Ram trucks already utilizes the air springs to detect the amount of load onboard, which is used for ABS and normal ESP calibration. The CG height and roll-mitigation integration are what’s new here. These new air bags have another trick up their sleeves — they incorporate little external tanks that allow the springs to vary their volume as well as their pressure. Adding volume changes the spring rate, so that the springs can have a comfort rate and a sport rate, for example. Similar units are currently being supplied to the Porsche Panamera. The test car employed remote reservoirs, but Continental expects to be able to integrate this volume into the production air-spring struts. We drove a Grand Cherokee with 350 pounds of steel plates mounted to the luggage rack, and watched a monitor screen as the computer gradually zoomed in on a CG measurement. (A big red ball on the chart in the middle of the graphic shrinks in size, turning yellow and then green when it’s been calculated.) We then executed three lane-change maneuvers. In standard tuning, the vehicle rolled pretty precipitously before incurring a big stab of ESP intervention. With the CG-informed roll-mitigation, there was way less body roll and earlier and less severe ESP intervention. The best trip was with load recognition active and the variable spring rate function enabled to further limit the amount of roll. This hardware is ready for implementation and integration, so expect to see it in two to three years.

Autonomous Emergency Braking Driver Focus Vehicle

Here the idea is to tailor the autonomous braking response according to the driver’s level of attentiveness. To do this, a single camera is mounted atop the steering column and pointed at the driver’s face. It does not follow eye movements, only the direction the head is pointing. If a threat is perceived by the system and the driver is not looking in the direction of the threat, a “halo” of LED lighting that rings the cockpit attempts to draw attention to the trouble, with “comets” of white light shooting toward the trouble zone that become red when the problem becomes critical. When attention is away from the danger, braking begins much earlier. If the driver appears to be looking in the direction of the problem, the braking is delayed until much later, and is then more severe. The idea is that if you’re looking at the delivery truck slowing for the right-hand turn, you probably know it will be out of the way in time to proceed safely by, but if you’re scolding the kids in the back seat, you might need to swivel your head quickly.

Interior Camera System

These days, with anti-texting laws, crafty drivers have learned to keep their head up and just their eyes down at their devices, so a camera that can only see that your head is facing forward isn’t quite sufficient. Enter a pair of infrared cameras mounted about where the A/C vents are, flanking the steering wheel. These cameras can see under hat brims, through dark sunglasses, and even at night to detect which where your eyes are (and set mirrors and head-up displays), which way they are looking (to inform the autonomous braking system mentioned above), and whether they are open and how fast they are blinking to help detect drowsiness, being asleep, or perhaps even becoming incapacitated. (In that case, a car with active braking and steering could conceivably curb the car, put on the emergency flashers, and contact authorities.) It can also inform the Autonomous Emergency Braking system noted above. But it’s hard to sell customers on a costly system they think will just nag them, so they’re also promoting other benefits such as facial recognition to set seat/mirror/radio preset data for multiple vehicle users who may not each have their own dedicated key fob. The information could even be shared across fleets, so that any police officer climbing aboard any cruiser would get his or her preferences loaded. Or imagine if every Hertz rental car (probably the upgraded ones) could recognize you and sync your phone and nav preferences in any location? This one’s probably the farthest out, but it’s pretty cool.